by Sophie Davis
“Why didn’t Michael say anything to me?” I wondered aloud, over the sounds of the wallscreen playing quietly in the background.
Erik and I were in Mac’s office searching for intel on the Privileged, specifically plans for Gretchen’s world domination. It was the only thing to do while we waited for Penny to organize an extraction and relocation for our prisoners and friends alike. It was still unclear whether I would remain at the McDonough School or move with everyone else. My mere presence put my friends in even more danger, particularly Alex. Still, there was no safer place for him than by my side.
Damned if I do, damned if I don’t, I thought wryly.
Erik glanced up from Mac’s computer, one hand massaging the back of his neck.
“Because he knows you didn’t do it.”
“He still should’ve told me that I was public enemy number one.” I gestured to the wallscreen, specifically the ticker at the bottom where my name appeared. Next to it was a list of countries and the globe amounts they were each willing to pay for my capture. “Someone really should’ve warned me about this.”
Empathy filled Erik’s turquoise gaze, though not entirely for me. On the wallscreen behind me, a biased, Talent-hating reporter was live in New York—Dana Duval. I barely listened to her words, focusing instead on the scene unfolding in the background.
UNITED agents in full riot gear attempted to keep order as a line of bedraggled people disembarked from a commercial pod. These were the Talents attempting to find sanctuary. The crowd on the docks screamed obscenities. Some even threw handfuls of dirt and gravel in the newcomers’ direction. Most of the Talents appeared too scared to respond, and the UNITED sentries were avoiding conflict. Even if they’d wanted to retaliate, a uniformed agent using talents against norms on camera would be a public relations nightmare.
“Would it have changed anything?” Erik asked absently, eyes still glued to the wallscreen. “Or maybe Michael thought you already knew?”
I shook my head. Whatever. It didn’t matter.
At least the new info explained why so many bounty hunters were after me. Half the world had guaranteed very large sums of money to the person or organization who captured me, dead or alive.
“Is it just me, or is it odd that most of the countries offering bounties are notoriously anti-Talented?” I spat. “I mean, what would they care if I did murder the head of the UNITED council?”
I didn’t really expect Erik to answer and was a little surprised when he did.
“It’s not that odd,” he said with a sigh. “It’s an excuse to get the entire world hunting you, both norms and Talented. Which probably means Gretchen is somehow behind the accusation.”
“It does ring of her convoluted logic,” I hedged. “But she couldn’t have known Victoria would go to meet Gracia in your place. She also couldn’t have known UNITED would automatically assume I killed her.”
Even as I said the words, I knew they sounded naïve. Gretchen had manufactured her very own Mind Manipulator, why not a Visionary, too? Or even something else, something more like Epsilon’s ability to examine multiple paths and outcomes.
“It could’ve just been luck on her part,” Erik suggested. I cocked an eyebrow and he shrugged. “What? I’m not saying she doesn’t have a Visionary on her payroll. I’m positive she would, actually. But you know how unreliable visions are. I doubt Gretchen would rely on them, particularly when you’re involved.”
“Me? What’s wrong with me?” I asked.
Erik still had one eye on the wallscreen and one on me. Suddenly, he did a doubletake and focused his attention entirely on the news.
“You’re impulsive. Hard to see the future of someone who makes snap decisions,” he murmured, tapping a volume control button for the wallscreen located on Mac’s desk console.
“Amberly Azevedo, Portuguese delegate to the UNITED council died tragically this morning….” Duval began.
My head whipped around as images of a nice neighborhood with large houses came on screen. One sprawling home filled the screen, surrounded by a high, iron fence with ivy wound around the posts. Ordinarily, the yard was probably idyllic. But the mob of angry norms with clubs and metal rods gave off a very hostile vibe.
“Oh, no,” I breathed, confident I knew what was coming.
It was so much worse than I could have imagined. A dozen men and women breached the gate and stormed Amberly’s front door. Several minutes later, the councilwoman was dragged onto the front lawn, along with a man and two little girls I didn’t recognize.
“I don’t know if I can watch this,” I said. Still, I didn’t look away, not even when my empty stomach began churning.
“Viewer discretion is advised,” Duvall said almost gleefully. Her image was inset at the top of the screen, conveniently allowing a clear view of the carnage about to take place in the main frame. “The following is not suitable for young children.”
I was positive the following wasn’t suitable for anyone, not if this was how Amberly met her end.
The club-wielding mob forced the man and the little girls to their knees. Amberly remained on her feet, defiance in her dark gaze. Amberly had been a lot of things, but a coward was not one of them. Even outnumbered, she wasn’t going down without a fight. Pride made my chest swell, if only because I wanted to think the kindest thoughts possible for those who’d died fighting for Talent equality and freedom.
“What do you want?” Amberly demanded in Portuguese. Without thinking, I translated for Erik.
“Your head!” someone yelled from outside the fence.
“Justice!” another screamed.
“Die abomination!” cried a third.
A tall woman with a geometric tattoo covering her left arm stepped closer to Amberly and farther from one of the little girls.
“We want you freaks out of our country,” she told the councilwoman.
“The Talented plan to leave,” Amberly replied evenly.
“No, no.” The woman shook her sadly. “That’s not good enough. You don’t belong among the norms. You don’t belong among the living.”
Without warning, the unmistakable sound of a gunshot pierced the air. I gasped loudly, and Erik swore even louder. Amberly’s face contorted in rage, which was when I realized she wasn’t the intended target. To her right, the man on his knees fell forward as if in slow motion.
Amberly’s scream of anguish was inhuman.
She dove for the shooter, morphing midleap and sinking sharp canines into the man’s throat the instant she made contact. Then, the lioness turned her rage on those closest to the little girls. Though I didn’t want to see any of it, I found it impossible to tear my eyes away.
The councilwoman killed three more people before the woman with the large arm tattoo finally took down the beautiful lioness. With Amberly out of the way, the two little girls would be next. Sure enough, the tattooed woman strode toward the little girls.
I really hoped that even Dana Duval was above using children’s deaths for ratings.
“Turn it off!” I exclaimed, squeezing my eyes shut. I couldn’t watch, the terror on their faces was too much.
“I have your daughters, Madam President,” the woman said before Erik silenced the wallscreen. “If you want them back alive, you will order all the abominations out of Portugal.”
The scene reverted to Dana Duval in New York. Erik moved to stand beside the chair where I sat.
“The girls must be Amberly’s nieces,” he said quietly. “Her sister is the Portuguese president.”
“So Amberly wasn’t even the target?” I asked incredulously. The man on his knees was dead. Amberly was dead. Yet they were just useless casualties.
“Probably not.” Erik massaged his temples, eyes closed. “Amberly has no authority in Portugal, not really. She couldn’t order the Talented to be exiled even if she wanted to. Her sister, though….” He trailed off with a shrug.
We both knew those little girls were as good as dead. Even before t
he Great Contamination, hostage-style situations were common in war, and it didn’t typically end well for the hostage. The practice had grown in popularity during the promising time just after the Coexistence Treaty first passed. Children and spouses of prominent decisionmakers in Joint Nations member countries were often kidnapped and ransomed for the small price of removal of our kind from the area. Was the world really reverting to those barbaric ways?
“First the islands, now Portugal,” I said. “Where’s next? How many hate groups are going to use this as an example?”
“The President might not acquiesce to the demands,” Erik pointed out.
“Maybe not,” I agreed. “But when she doesn’t, and those two little girls die, other leaders will give in.”
“Tals…,” Erik began gently.
His hand was on my shoulder, and he squeezed. A calming wave passed from his body to mine. The problem was, I didn’t want to be calm. The world was going to shit. I didn’t want to sit safely in the middle of nowhere while little girls were stolen from their beds and murdered to further political agendas.
Erik backed away from me, his temper rising faster than mine had. Eyes shut tightly, he held one hand toward me.
“You need to calm down, Talia,” he growled.
Had I not been so worked up myself, I would’ve realized his emotions had spiked into the danger zone.
“Don’t,” I warned, suddenly on my feet and advancing toward him. “Don’t tell me to calm down when that—” I gestured angrily to the wallscreen “—is our new reality. The only safe haven for Talented was destroyed today. I should be out there! We should be out there!”
Turquoise flames twisted in Erik’s eyes. We were face to face, his towering inches above mine. The anger and hostility surrounding him was staggering, but I stood my ground.
“Not even you can fight off all the people gunning for you, Natalia,” he snapped. A muscle near his eye twitched, and a vein in his neck bulged.
Erik shook his head, trying to clear his thoughts. They were dark, terrifying thoughts that made me swallow my retort. The shadows that often lurked in the corners of his mind came to the forefront. For just a second, I saw the memories he worked so hard to hide from me.
Flashes of light. Wisps of movement. Bursts of pain.
My body was on fire, and my mind was mush. Something inside of me was…off. It was too primal to be human and too cognitive to be animal. Then, darkness engulfed me. Erik’s memories vanished as quickly as they’d come.
It took more effort than I could’ve imagined, but I finally spoke with forced calm.
“I can’t sit around and do nothing, Erik,” I told him slowly. As I enunciated each word, Mac’s office came back into focus.
A million emotions played across Erik’s features in the span of several long seconds. The air was thick with tension. It was the first time since our reunion that Erik’s control had truly slipped, and I felt the tremendous amount of will he’d needed to regain composure.
He did, though, I told myself, forcing my expression to remain blank. I didn’t want him to know how much the brief lapse worried me, not when he was already fighting so hard to keep me from witnessing his increasingly volatile nature.
“Why?” Erik asked finally. His tone was eerily even.
I squinted up at him. “Why, what?”
“Why are we here, Talia? At the McDonough’s house? What is it you hope to find?”
Good question, I thought.
“Answers,” I said aloud.
“Answers to what questions?”
Neither Erik’s tone nor his emotions suggested that he was anything besides curious. Still, only the very recent slip in his control kept me from taking offense. Well, much offense, anyway.
“Come on, Talia,” Erik prodded. “You didn’t hesitate when Kip asked where to teleport us. So why here? What’s here?”
I turned my back to him and started pacing.
“I don’t know, okay? Happy? I don’t know why we’re here. I made a mistake, obviously.”
“You didn’t make a mistake.” His words weren’t friendly but also weren’t hostile. “Why?” he pushed.
“Selby Masterson.” I whipped around to face him and saw satisfaction in his gaze. “Her name was in a report Victoria gave me, but I knew I’d seen it before. Here, in this house.”
Erik eyed me as he made a get-to-the-point gesture. I shot him an annoyed glare but continued anyway.
“Selby Masterson is part of Gretchen’s operation in France, but their acquaintance goes back much farther than that.” I ran a hand over the messy knot of damp hair on top of my head. “There’s evidence of that relationship here, which probably means there’s other information about the Privileged, the clones, and Gretchen’s messed up plans for an evil utopian society.
“The place in France where Gracia came from, where Gretchen probably is—it didn’t just spring into being,” I continued. “The processes that went into making Gracia didn’t develop overnight. There must be records of…something.” It was a lame ending to my impassioned speech, but I was still working through the thoughts myself.
My gaze locked with Erik’s and held. I expected him to challenge me, to poke holes in my reasoning. Instead, irritatingly smug satisfaction shone on his face. I fought the urge to sigh with relief.
“So, you think we’ll find intel here that will help us defeat Gretchen?” he asked, though it didn’t sound like a question.
“Yes.”
Erik reached me in three long strides. “Then you—we—aren’t sitting around and doing nothing, Talia. For right now, until we hear back from Penny about the extraction plan, searching for intel is the only thing we can do.”
He reached for me, and I let him fold me into his arms. The mood swings were dizzying.
It’s not his fault, I reminded myself. In time, he would learn to control them just as I had. Or maybe he won’t have to.
Truly, Selby Masterson had played a part in my decision to return to the McDonough School. It was also the first place I’d ever felt safe. And the last place I’d really been innocent. I genuinely believed Mac’s personal records would have something that might help us in the war to come.
But that wasn’t the intel I longed to find. I wanted to know if there was a way to reverse the effects of the creation drug.
My most recent glimpse inside Erik’s deepest memories only solidified the desperation that had swirled in my gut like liquid cement since I found my boyfriend inside of Tramblewood. What Mac had done to him—the physical torture Erik had endured—was nothing compared to the overabundance of power that he fought to tame every day.
Crane’s people were trying to reverse engineer the creation drug but hadn’t made much progress. I needed a way to speed up the process.
Because Erik needed that cure before he lost something worse than his life. If nothing changed, he’d lose his mind. And I’d lose him forever.
Chapter Fourteen
Cressa
Cressa’s entire body fired in excruciating pain. It was like the talent signature implantations, except it wasn’t abating and she’d gained consciousness instead of passing out. Was she getting another procedure? Another talent? Were they giving all six of the remaining ones simultaneously? Would it ever end?
Why the hell didn’t you run? What do they want from you?
Panic set in, deep and cold and spiraling through her veins until there was nothing else left of her but the fear. The last thing she remembered was Kev’s look of contempt, then nothing. Her eyes felt glued shut, like they’d been closed for an extended period of time.
Building the courage to open them, Cressa’s mind conjured the darkest possibilities for her location. The fact she could feel pain was enough to know she wasn’t in the horrifying sensory deprivation gel. Was she confined to an electrified cage? It felt like she was laying down, not floating weightlessly. Strapped to a metal table? Moving one arm a few inches took immense effort, but only the radiat
ing ache restrained her movement.
With a deep breath, Cressa pried her eyes open and peeked through her lashes.
Instead of a cold, sterile room, she was in a simple bedroom decorated in shades of buttercup and gold. The bed was large and soft, and she was propped up on a pile of memory cushions. Pain shot through her neck when she tried to move it, so Cressa settled for staring at the brass chandelier that hung from above. Nothing about her surroundings justified the anxiety she felt, but Cressa’s heart continued to race. Every inch of her body was wrapped in a deep ache, like she’d been competing in physical trials for a year.
“I’m here,” a sleepy voice called from somewhere to her left.
Cressa’s head snapped to the side instinctively, but she wrenched it back when she registered the owner of the voice. The fire in her muscles screamed at the movements. She didn’t want to look, didn’t want to see Kev’s disgust again. When she tried to ask why he was there, only a low moan came out. A moment later, she felt the mattress dip on one side as he sat down.
“No,” she groaned. Cressa had a lot more words for him, but her body wasn’t cooperating. Every movement, however small, sent another wave of anguish.
“No to what?” Kev’s worried face came into her line of sight. His beautiful eyes were crinkled in the corners, his brow furrowed.
“You,” Cressa snapped. “No.”
Despite her protests, Kev moved closer. He put one hand on Cressa’s arm while the other pushed the stray hair from her forehead. A heavy thundercloud darkened the sunshine in his gaze.
“She used me in your test.”
It wasn’t a question. Flames of anger radiated from Kev as he gently stroked one of her cheeks. “It wasn’t real, Cressa. Whatever happened, it wasn’t me.”
Somehow, his closeness seemed to abate the agony in her body. Without thinking, Cressa slumped onto one side and curled into Kev. Everywhere they touched, she felt cool relief. He was so close, so beautifully close.
